Seth Clearwater Imprinted With Trouble

Chap. 16

We sat in the forest and waited for what felt like the worst kind of forever. Originally we were close enough to the clearing to hear faint whispers of what Clari and Aro said, but Clari appeared out of the brush like a wraith and forced us to move even further away.

She was kind of angry about it, too.

Carlisle sat immobile, perfectly straight and still. His brows were creased and he stared unblinkingly in the direction of the clearing. But I couldn’t sit still. I had to move. There was too much tension in my body: my pulse was racing, adrenaline was pumping through my body, and my limbs felt like deadweight, deadweight that needed to be carted around. I paced back and forth, practically wearing a path into the underbrush in this part of the forest. I had to clamp down on my jaw to prevent myself from shifting, sprinting out there, grabbing Clari, and running until she was safe—or keep running forever.

The other vamps in the forest were some sort of mix between my extreme anxiety and Carlisle’s anxious waiting. They stood fidgeting slightly, but not pacing like me. I don’t think they were worried about Aro’s health: they were more worried about my visible urge to get involved, to tear vampire heads from shoulders, to rip diamond-hard limbs from sockets.

Heh. Let’em worry about it. A healthy dose of fear is good for them, makes them remember they aren’t as high up on the food chain as they think they are.

As I turned to begin another lap of pacing, I glared at the whole group of them, lips pulling back in a smile that screamed of ill intent. I rolled my shoulders and allowed the muscles to bulge and flex with a sinewy smoothness that was pure shifter. Their fidgeting increased, and more than half of them turned to watch me. They looked tense.

I smiled. I wanted them off balance. I wanted them intimidated. I wanted to fight, to win, to finish this and put it all behind me, collect Clari and put it all behind us—

Clari.

A sudden surge of trepidation swept over me—it seized and locked my joints up, froze my muscles. For an endless moment my helplessness over the entire situation was exacerbated—magnified, multiplied. I realized how truly little I could affect the things in this world that were meant to be. And that terrified me. It felt like fate, and fate wasn’t something I could prevent.

The surge passed almost as suddenly as it overcame me, and instantly I was moving, shifting, sprinting. Carlisle followed closely behind me, and the Volturi just a few steps behind him. In some distant part in my mind, I realized that they must have felt the same thing I had: it wasn’t just a single epiphany on my part. It was an all-encompassing feeling that spread from and to every figure in the clearing, a great movement of clarification. Like some balance in the world had tipped and we all had to almost imperceptibly realign the scales by adjusting our very selves.

It was unnerving. Very unnerving.

But Clari—Clari was in the forefront of my mind, the most important thing at the moment. I needed to make sure that she was okay, that she was in the exact same condition she was when I left her in that clearing, all by herself, to face Aro.

I dug into the soft ground with my claws, mud sinking between the pads of my feet, uncaringly sailing over fallen trees and large outcroppings of rocks, heading directly to my little bird. I didn’t slow down or hesitate as I broke away from the tree line and into the field, but Carlisle and the Volturi did as we all took in the sight before us.